Do We Matter Anymore?

A jarring recent post in The Atlantic raises that very question. Charles Davi, a New York-based capital- and derivatives-markets lawyer, crunches sets of numbers and comes to this conclusion: "People are becoming less valuable to companies."

Part of his analysis examines the wage-growth differential in various income brackets (the rich are getting richer scenario) but it also looks at Moore's Law and the growth of containerized shipping.

You're familiar with the effects of Moore's Law, but perhaps not so much with the containers. The combination of the two, according to Davi, has been profound over the last three decades:

The freedom of capital to move throughout the world in search for labor has fundamentally changed the balance of power between labor and capital... This dynamic is already exerting sizable, downward pressure on the value of labor relative to capital in developed nations.

We know wages -- even in high-skilled professions such as engineering -- have stagnated for a decade, much of that due to the Great Recession. My sense is that this will improve once the economy improves and that the intellectual rigor required to design chips and boards -- even helped along by productivity-enhancing tools -- will remain highly prized and well rewarded.

But I could be being Pollyana about this.

What's your sense? Is it instead a matter of not if but when we will automate ourselves out of even highly skilled occupations in the electronics sector?

I look at it this way. The same way that hackers are always a step ahead of the security pros, this way the security pros always have a task to handle one way or another. I feel like the cat & mouse game of technology will identically always require humans.

Agreed, but for how long? The optimist in me believes that humans, somehow, will always remain one intellectual step ahead of the technologies they create. But then sometimes I'm not sure sure. We've tied the world together with the Internet. Now we're tying in sensors to that massive infrastracture and we don't have a sense for all the consequences.

Yes, there are more well educated than people without education, unemployment crisis is in every cornet in this planet. Companies cannot handle anymore this situation, even governments cannot help. I don't know how we can surpass this and when .....

Somebody will still have to operate the devices and interpret results but machines are already being prepared for that as well. There are some jobs that may not be taken over by "intellingent agents" for sure, but most of the decision making processes in the enterprise and in the market will likely be handled by computer systems in a very near future.

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